As my two favorite sports are college football and soccer (I like the country variety slightly more than the club variety), days like this upcoming Saturday are a huge smorgasbord for me that I look forward to for weeks to come. Not only is is a FIFA match date with World Cup 2010 qualifiers being played on every continent except Asia, but it's a full college football day, as well.
On days like this, I like to setup up a couple of TVs and a computer and gorge myself. To make it even more gluttonous, I pay closer attention to sports I don't normally care about. By that I mean, any sport except auto racing is fair game.
I encourage you to do as I do on Saturday and watch as much of it as you can. Here are the big games across all sports.
As far as college football goes, the day starts out strong with Oklahoma vs. Texas at Noon EDT. More often then not, it seems like this game is dulled by the fact that one of the two programs are on a downswing. Not this year. It's the marquee matchup of the week in college football (ESPN's "College GameDay" is going there).
The 3:30 games are nothing special, alas. Notre Dame and North Carolina is the best of an iffy lot. CBS got unlucky that Tennessee stinks this year, or else the Vols traveling to Georgia would look pretty good. I'll give props as well to Michigan State at Northwestern, who are a collective 10-1 coming in.
But don't feel too bad for CBS, they get the best primetime game, LSU at Florida, and there's a couple others matchups of top 25 teams (using the coach's poll anyway), Penn State at Wisconsin and Oklahoma State at Missouri at the same time.
Three great primetime games, and yet they might all have to take a backseat to Game 2 of the ALCS, featuring the getting-to-be-as-obnoxious-and-hatable Red Sox (nation) against everyone's favorite worst-to-first story, the Devil Rays. You see why I want to set up 2-3 TVs and/or computers.
How big of a match day is it World Cup qualifying in Europe? There were 16 teams good enough to qualify for Euro 2008, and eight of them play each other: France at Romania, Portugal at Sweden, Czech Republic at Poland, and Russia at Germany. But there's also Ukraine, who played in the World Cup of 2006, hosting Croatia, and Italy traveling to Bulgaria, ranked 16th in the world. England's in action, too, hosting Kazakhstan.
In CONCACAF, the North American region, five of the six teams that will take place in the final round of qualifying are pretty much settled. Barring a huge string of upsets, it will be the United States, Mexico, Honduras, Costa Rica, and El Salvador. The sixth team will be either Trinidad & Tobago or Guatemala. They tied their first leg in Trinidad, and Saturday at 10 PM Eastern is the return visit to Guatemala City.
USA, as I mentioned, is pretty much in, and they host Cuba at 4 PM. When the United States hosted Cuba for Olympic qualifying, a slew of Cuban players defected, leaving Cuba with only 11 men — exactly enough to field a team, with no subs. Interesting, then, they the USSF scheduled this game for Washington, DC, where it will be easy to defect.
The headline game for South American qualifying is probably Uruguay, who has been to 10 of 18 World Cups, but narrowly missed qualifying last time and on the periphery again this time, traveling to Argentina to try to pickup some tough points.
It will be the first full Saturday of the NHL season, and five games feature teams that made the playoffs last year at both ends of the ice: Detroit (1W) at Ottawa (7E), New York Rangers (5E) at Philadelphia (6E), Dallas (5W) at Nashville (8W), New Jersey (4E) at Pittsburgh (2E), and Boston (8E) at Minnesota (3W). They may all take a backseat, however, to the NHL's biggest rivalry, with Montreal traveling to Toronto.
One of the few soccer leagues that does not take FIFA match day off is the MLS, which has three games on Saturday, the best of which would be New England at Kansas City.
The PGA, the European PGA, and the Asian PGA all have events this week, the Texas Open, the Madrid Masters, and the Indian Open, respectively.
In tennis, the Tennis Channel will be broadcasting the ladies semifinals of the Kremlin Cup, where Venus Williams has already been ousted.
If you're a rugby fan and you get Setanta USA, you'll get Currie Cup playoffs from South Africa in the morning and Heineken Cup late at night.
There's even a heavyweight championship bout to be won on Sunday, with Vitali Klitschko a slight favorite over Samuel Peter.
But of course, all of this — all of it — takes a back seat to college field hockey, and the Big Ten Network has you covered there, too, with Iowa at Penn State at 5:30 PM EST. Set your alarms.
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